TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

IBU TO YOUNG LEARNERS

International Burch University

Chapter 4 – Learning Words

Discourse skills - Revision
• Principle: To learn discourse skills children need :
- to participate in discourse
- to build up knowledge and skills for participation
• Children need to learn ‘parts’ – components of
description and to practice integrating those parts
into the whole.
• To develop discourse skills of children, teachers should focus on the awareness of
the following:

• Types of discourse – their organization and components, the language forms used
in their construction
• An understanding of children’s developing communication skills and cognitive
abilities
• The importance of working outwards from the familiar
• The primacy of narrative
• The educational significance of discourse
Effective support for children’s foreign
language discourse skills
• To use the foreign language to produce narrative and
description- the assembling of ideas into organized
discourse patterns is required so that the listeners can
make sense.
• Support through motivating topics - element of
choice
• Support through task structure – clear purpose and
goal
Support through language practice – provide various learning
opportunities

• Models of language use to listen to, notice

• Opportunities for repeated listening
• Opportunities to say words and phrases
• Feedback on production to improve fluency and accuracy
• Support for remembering the information while talking
• Rehearsals of chunks of talk
Revision:

• A major part of teaching young learners is ORAL.

• The meaning and purpose of discourse needs to be made accessible
to the learners
• Personal involvement in the talk increase participation
• Speaking makes different demands from listening and understanding
• Children tend to produce formulaic sequences
• Children are capable of participating in narrative and simple
descriptive discourse
• Short practice activities can help build productive language to use in
discourse
• Children need experience of a range of discourse types to increase
their skills with types beyond narrative
• Dialogues offer learning opportunities
Learning Words
Overview of vocabulary development
• the term ‘vocabulary development’
• the role of ‘words’ in children’s world
• the principle of Vygotsky in the acquisition of words for children
• the relation of first language and foreign language learning words
• the ‘vocabulary size’
• ‘knowing a word’
• the types of word categories used in early childhood
• cultural content affect the learning of foreign language words?
Different aspects of vocabulary knowledge in learning words, principles for
teaching vocabulary

• function and content words

• essential steps in vocabulary learning
• basic techniques of teachers’ explaining the meanings of new words
• importance of form in vocabulary learning
• thematic organization of vocabulary
• organization of vocabulary through relations of wholes to parts
• organization of vocabulary in general to specific hierarchies
• organization of vocabulary through words and antonyms
Developing children’s own autonomy as self-directed vocabulary learners

• common features of vocabulary teaching in textbooks

• children’s vocabulary development beyond text books
• Learner’s choice
• Incidental learning of vocabulary through stories
• vocabulary learning strategies
• strong and slow learners differ in vocabulary learning
• some useful strategies for vocabulary learning
• general strategies of helping children to learn vocabulary